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Abstract
Deaf President Now, or DPN, should be viewed as a process, not as a single event. The forces that led to the installation of the first deaf president at Gallaudet were set in motion long before 1988, and they continued to be significant through the protests of 2006. Among the many changes wrought by the 1988 DPN movement is a fundamental shift in the demographics of the Gallaudet workforce, such that the percentage of deaf people among the pool of employees has doubled from 25 percent to 50 percent. This article attempts to put DPN in historical context, and it argues that this shift in the Gallaudet workforce has led to profound changes in the institutional culture.
I have two basic goals for this article:1 First, I discuss some of the historical background of the protest that resulted in the appointment of I. King Jordan as the first deaf president of Gallaudet in 1988. The 1988 protest did not simply appear out of nowhere-it had historical roots, and that history had an impact on what followed Jordan's appointment. Second, I discuss the continuing nature of the Deaf President Now (DPN) movement at Gallaudet-it did not end in 1988, and forces that were set in motion then continue today. Much of what I discuss in this article is based on my personal experience. During my thirty years of service at Gallaudet, I had an opportunity to work under all but three of its ten presidents. I began working at Gallaudet in 1980, first in planning and institutional research, then as the university's chief budget officer and liaison to the U.S. Department of Education. I served in those roles from 1987 until 2007, during the entire Jordan administration. I was the director of the Gallaudet University Press from 2007 until I retired in 2010. In these roles, and especially as budget director, I became familiar with much of Gallaudet's administrative operations and relations with the federal government. For the next two years I worked on a sesquicentennial history of the university, which was published in 2014. In the course of preparing this narrative I have had the good fortune to work with a number of people who are very knowledgeable about Gallaudet's history, including Jack...